You need to have a CD system which takes equality pinned deps and bumps them when new versions come through and automatically runs the new versions through whatever your test/integration/production environments looks like. And you should have sufficient integration testing that you should have confidence that an automated process should be able to decide if the new version should get deployed to prod (being realistic you probably want to confine these deployments to some sort of reasonable business hours).
Then the tech debt gets addressed automatically without any work. The work is all up front to write the tests that give you confidence about deployment to production, but that is work that needs to happens and pays off. You shouldn't need to have human testing in the loop.
Then the tech debt gets addressed automatically without any work. The work is all up front to write the tests that give you confidence about deployment to production, but that is work that needs to happens and pays off. You shouldn't need to have human testing in the loop.